Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer: A Book Review

Currently, at fifty years old, I find myself really reflecting on decisions I’ve made and what maybe I thought I wanted for myself versus what I really needed for myself. When I was in my thirties with young children, I always imagined fifty being a period in my life when I had everything figured out. I imagined contentment, peace, and some satisfaction with what I’d done. It surprises me how discontenting being fifty years old can be. Just today my daughter texted me pictures of apartments near Grand Valley State University. She plans to attend in the fall. She texted, “I’m so excited” and, even as I texted back that I’m excited for her, I was thinking with melancholy, “But didn’t you just get here? Do you have to rush off?”

I suppose I find myself experiencing ennui (and maybe even a mid-life crisis of sorts) and though it’s not universally the case with the collection, many of the stories in Kelly Fordon’s I Have the Answer deal with the ennui and disillusion of middle age. So the book arrived to me at the right time, even if sometimes its comfort was simply the idea that I’m not alone in my feelings.

It’s fitting that I recently taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to my literature students. The wallpaper with its confounding patterns can stand in as a metaphor for society and its expectations. Like the main character, we can get trapped behind those patterns and never discover who we were truly meant to be. Society can even shame us into avoiding who we were meant to be. But, society also lays out a pretty clear-cut path, if not a narrow and diminishing path. We are told: go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a career, get promotions, buy houses, have children, get luxuries, etc, and many of the characters in Fordon’s collection are slowly realizing that such a prescription for existence has its limitations and disappointments. I often tell my students, “You are asked to make some of the most significant choices of your life when you have the least wisdom to make them. The unexamined choices of your twenties will come home to roost in your forties.”

I know, I sound like such a fun professor.

Doesn’t make what I said less true.

Many of Fordon’s characters are finding their unexamined choices coming home to roost. In “The Shorebirds and the Shaman” Corrine navigates the loss of her fifty-five year old husband, something that her prescribed path had never foretold: Yes, that person you married could get sick or die relatively young. What does that do to all the plans you made for the future? For Corrine, she becomes nearly a recluse until a concerned friend tricks her into an experimental group therapy session that practices an intriguing technique called Constellation Work:

“Dan explained that Constellation Work is a tool for uncovering unhealthy family dynamics, which sometimes span generations. It was created by a German man named Bert Hellinger, who had modeled the technique after a tribal ritual he’d witnessed in Africa.”

The therapy scenes are fascinating. Eventually, Corrine is able to speak to her husband again as his spirit (supposedly) embodies a woman named Oonan, a shaman. Both Corrine’s reaction and the ending of the story are wholly satisfying, leaving the reader wondering, “What would Constellation Work reveal about me?”

Fordon’s story “How It Passed” follows a collection of couples as they begin to move through the cycle of society’s prescribed path. We find them as they start to have babies, and we are moved through sixteen years of their lives together. They struggle as couples, they struggle with their children, and they struggle with themselves. And as one reads, one realizes that what these people are doing is simply following blindly the well-lit and poorly-examined path that was laid before them from the moment of their births. In the section of the story titled Year Four, we get:

“We have more babies. No more nap time for mom. One baby bellowing all morning. Another ramming into walls all afternoon. This constant racket is getting to us. We yell and scream and curse and then we gather at the park for mass absolution.”

In many of Fordon’s stories, the promise of children is juxtaposed with the reality that when we bring children into the world, we are actually bringing in human beings with all of their potential glories, foibles, and tragedies. They aren't guaranteed to save us.

In the section titled Year Fifteen we read:

“Steve and Margery pick up their son at TCBY after the eighth-grade mixer, and he’s drunk. At the Dinner Club we all shake our heads.

'He threw up for four hours straight,' Margery says.

'He’s just a baby,' Steve says. 'He looked like a little wasted baby.'"

“How It Passed” has one of the most powerful ending paragraphs I’ve read in a long time. But I’m not going to quote it here. I don’t think a reviewer should ever give away the ending of a story, but its wisdom is worth waiting for your own copy of this book.

Fordon explores with honesty the actual risks and rewards of bringing children into the world. Society seems to say, “Well, that’s just what you do. They will be your greatest joy.” Fordon doesn’t set out to disavow this notion completely. Even in her bio at the back of the book, she mentions her own four children and describes them as “the best people I know.”

Fordon isn’t anti-childrearing, but she certainly wants to shed some truthful light on it. Many of the stories show parents struggling to understand their children as they come into their own adulthood. It makes me think that couples considering having children should read this book, not to dissuade them, but to simply say, “And this… this too could happen.”

In “Why Did I Ever Think This Was a Good Idea?” (a question her characters seem to be unconsciously asking throughout the collection), a woman struggles with her soon-to-be-empty nest. Her life revolved around raising her children, and the story suggests that she gave up her dreams of being an artist for them. Her absent husband fills his days with golf and she, to her dismay, bumps heads with her youngest who will soon leave for a “gap year” in China. She loved him so much as a baby but, in a moment of nostalgia when, by herself in her cluttered art studio, she dances to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” she discovers her son watching her dance.

Children can be beautiful and cruel, and discovering her dancing the son simply says, before walking away, “You look sooooo stupid, Mom,” erasing her brief joy instantly.

And this… this too could happen.

Fordon’s stories are a wonderfully complex look at life and how our expectations can bump up against our realities. The stories are sobering and yet, as I wrote earlier, I found myself comforted by them.

Too much in popular culture deals with the finding of love, but then ends there. I think of the movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan finally meet face-to-face at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. It’s romantic. Theirs, like any relationship, starts at such great heights of promise, magic, and potential. Then, they climb into the elevator and begin their descent into their future.

Then, the movie ends.

Fordon’s stories? They pick up right after the elevator has started its descent.

Purchase a copy of Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer: here

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.